Code of Conduct
Leaders owe a covenant to the cooperation or institution, which is, after all, a group of people. Leaders owe the organization a new reference point for what caring, purposeful, committed people can be in the institutional setting. Leaders are responsible for such things as a sense of quality in the institution, for whether or not the institution is open to influence and open to change. Effective leaders encourage contrary opinions, an important source of vitality. We are talking about how leaders can nurture the roots of an institution, about a sense of continuity, about institutional culture. Leaders must deliver to their organizations the appropriate services, products, tools, and equipment that people in the organization need in order to be accountable. Besides owing assets to their institutions, leaders owe the people in those institutions certain things. Leaders need to be concerned with the institutional value system which, after all, leads to the principles and standards that guide the practices of the people in the institution. Leaders are also responsible for future leadership. They need to identify, develop, and nurture future leaders. Leaders owe a clear statement of the values of the organization. These values should be broadly understood and agreed to and should shape our corporate and individual behavior. What is this value system based on? How is it expressed? How is it audited? These are not easy questions to deal with. Only a group of people who share a body of knowledge and continually learn together can stay vital and viable. Covenants bind people together and enable them to meet their corporate needs by meeting the needs of one another. We must do this in a way that is consonant with the world within us. In the interest of fostering an open and tolerating environment, we as contributors and maintainers pledge to making participation in our projects and our community as harassment-free of an experience as possible for everyone, regardless of pass behavior, social deviance, cultural numbness and social inaptitude, age, body size, disability, ethnicity, gender identity and expression, level of experience, nationality, personal appearance, race, religion, or sexual identity and orientation. Examples of behavior that contributes to creating a positive environment include: * Using welcoming and inclusive language * Being respectful of differing viewpoints and experiences * Gracefully accepting constructive criticism And to close any loopholes arguments, someone like Linus Torvalds telling you your code sucks is NOT harassment or abuse, he's shitting on your contribution, not you, and since the contribution is raison d'etre of why you and anyone else is there, it is not a personal attack, it is frustration the contribution is bad, and should be taken as a call to improve it. * Focusing on what is best for the community * Showing empathy towards other community members * Other conduct which could reasonably be considered appropriate in a professional setting Examples of unacceptable behavior by participants include: * Trolling, and personal or political attacks * Public or private harassment * Ostracizing people for not predicting how people will react to their contributions. Not everyone one is neurotypical or share the same experiences as others, so as to prevent the requirement of mindreading, we do not expect you to correctly predict how your contributions will be viewed by others. * Intolerance of unacceptable behavior We will not police history. If someone behaves badly we will not destroy any evidence of it, we make both parties leave with the past to that others may learn from it. ---- Scope This Code of Conduct applies both within institutional spaces and in public spaces when an individual is representing the project or its community but does not apply to the personal lives of contributors or to activities outside institutional interests. Examples of representing a institution or community include using an official institutional e-mail address, posting via an official social media account, or acting as an appointed representative at an online or offline event. ---- The first principle to guide this institution is Participative Management. Participative management begins with a belief in the potential of people. Participative management without a belief in that potential and without convictions about the gifts people bring to organizations is a contradiction in terms. It cannot be added to, or subtracted from, a corporate policy manual as though it were one more managerial tool. Participative management arises out of the heart and out of a personal philosophy about people. Everyone has the right and the duty to influence decision making and to understand the results. Participative management guarantees that decisions will not be arbitrary, secret, or closed to questioning. Participative management is not democratic. Having a say differs from having a vote. ---- The second principle this institution strives for is to be political and cultural insensitive. We do not acquiesce to societal pressures. While we try to be welcoming to minorities, we do not do it by forcing everyone to speak as inoffensively as possible. As that has the side-effect of reduce neurodiversity, by stigmatizing anyone whose brain can’t color inside the lines of ‘appropriate speech’. Formal speech codes at American universities were also written by and for the ‘neurotypical’. They assume that everyone on campus is equally capable, 100% of the time, of: *Using their verbal intelligence and cultural background to understand speech codes that are intentionally vague, over-broad, and euphemistic, to discern who’s actually allowed to say what, in which contexts, using which words; *Understand what’s inside the current Overton window of ‘acceptable ideas’, including the current social norms about what is ‘respectful’ versus what is ‘offensive’, ‘inappropriate’, ‘sexist’, ‘racist’, ‘Islamophobic’, or ‘transphobic’; *Use ‘Theory of Mind’ to predict with 100% accuracy which speech acts might be offensive to someone of a different sex, age, race, ethnicity, national origin, sexual orientation, religion, or political outlook; *Inhibit ‘inappropriate’ speech with 100% reliability in all social contexts that might be reported or recorded by others; *Predict with 100% accuracy what’s likely to trigger outrage by peers, student activists, social media, or mainstream media – any of which might create ‘adverse publicity’ for the institute and a speech code inquisition, without due process or right of appeal, for the speaker. We do not assume a false model of human nature – that everyone has the same kind of brain that yields a narrow, ‘normal’ set of personality traits, cognitive and verbal abilities, moral temperaments, communication styles, and capacities for self-inhibition. That neurotypicality assumption is scientifically wrong, because different people inherit different sets of genes that influence how their brains grow and function, and every mental trait shows substantial heritability. These heritable mental traits run deep: they are stable across adolescence and adulthood, and they span everything from social intelligence to political attitudes. They also predict many aspects of human communication – probably including the ability to understand and follow formal speech codes and informal speech norms. ---- Leaders owe a certain maturity. Maturity as expressed in a sense of self-worth, a sense of belonging, a sense of expectancy, a sense of responsibility, a sense of accountability, and a sense of equality. Leaders are responsible for clarifying the standards of unacceptable behavior and are expected to take appropriate and fair corrective action in response to any instances of unacceptable behavior. Leaders owe the corporation rationality. Rationality gives reason and mutual understanding to programs and to relationships. It gives visible order. Excellence and commitment and competence are available to us only under the rubric of rationality. A rational environment values trust and human dignity and provides the opportunity for personal development and self-fulfillment in the attainment of the organization's goals. Leaders owe people space, space in the sense of freedom. Freedom in the sense of enabling our gifts to be exercised. We need to give each other the space to grow, to be ourselves, to exercise our diversity. We need to give each other space so that we may both give and receive such beautiful things as ideas, openness, dignity, joy, healing, and inclusion. And in giving each other the gift of space, we need also to offer the gifts of grace and beauty to which each of us is entitled. Leaders are obligated to provide and maintain momentum. Leadership comes with a lot of debts to the future. There are more immediate obligations as well. Momentum is one. Momentum in a vital company is palpable. It is not abstract or mysterious. It is the feeling among a group of people that their lives and work are intertwined and moving toward a recognizable and legitimate goal. It begins with competent leadership and a project team strongly dedicated to aggressive managerial development and opportunities. This team's job is to provide an environment that allows momentum to gather. Momentum comes from a clear vision of what the cooperation ought to be, from a well-thought-out strategy to achieve that vision, and from carefully conceived and communicated directions and plans that enable everyone to participate and be publicly accountable in achieving those plans. Momentum depends on a pertinent but flexible research and development program led by people with outstanding gifts and unique talents. Leaders are responsible for effectiveness. Much has been written about effectiveness—some of the best of it by Peter Drucker. He has such a great ability to simplify concepts. One of the things he tells us is that efficiency is doing the thing right, but effectiveness is doing the right thing. Leaders can delegate efficiency, but they must deal personally with effectiveness. The first is the understanding that effectiveness comes about through enabling others to reach their potential—both their personal potential and their corporate or institutional potential. One way to improve effectiveness is to encourage roving leadership. Roving leadership arises and expresses itself at varying times and in varying situations, according to the dictates of those situations. Roving leaders have the special gifts or the special strengths or the special temperament to lead in these special situations. They are acknowledged by others who are ready to follow them. In some South Pacific cultures, a speaker holds a conch shell as a symbol of a temporary position of authority. Leaders must understand who holds the conch—that is, who should be listened to and when. This makes it possible for people to use their gifts to the fullest for the benefit of everyone. Sometimes, to be sure, a leader must choose who is to speak. That is part of the risk of leadership. A leader must assess capability. A leader must be a judge of quality. For leaders choose a contribution, not a person. Leaders must take a role in developing, expressing, and defending civility and values. In a civilized institution or cooperation, we see good manners, respect for persons, an understanding of "good goods," and an appreciation of the way in which we serve each other. Civility has to do with identifying values as opposed to following fashions. Civility might be defined as an ability to distinguish between what is actually healthy and what merely appears to be popular. A leader can tell the difference between living edges and dying ones. To lose sight of the beauty of ideas and of hope and opportunity, and to frustrate the right to be needed, is to be at the dying edge. To be a part of a throwaway mentality that discards goods and ideas, that discards principles and law, that discards persons and families, is to be at the dying edge. To ignore the dignity of work and the elegance of simplicity, and the essential responsibility of serving each other, is to be at the dying edge. Leaders have the right and responsibility to edit, or reject, but not to delete, comments, commits, code, wiki edits, issues, and other contributions that are not aligned to this Code of Conduct, or to ban temporarily or permanently any contributor for other behaviors in institutional operations if the offense warrants such sanctions. Leaders who do not enforce the Code of Conduct in good faith may face temporary or permanent repercussions as determined by other members of the institution's leadership. ---- Instances of abusive, harassing, or otherwise unacceptable behavior may be reported by contacting the project team. All complaints will be reviewed and investigated and will result in a response that is deemed necessary and appropriate to the circumstances. The project team is obligated to maintain confidentiality with regard to the reporter of an incident; not withstanding the accused shale have the right to confront his accuser and to defend himself and to be notified in full of such accusations. Prudent to the principle of Participative Management all investigations should be viewable to the public.